Unholy Death Knight Stat Priority - Battle for Azeroth 8.0

introduction ->Welcome to Wowhead's Unholy Death Knight stats guide, updated to Tides of Vengeance, Battle for Azeroth Season 2! In this guide, we will explain how to find out which stats are the best for your Unholy Death Knight and how to check if a piece of gear is an upgrade or not.\r\rOur guides are always updated with the latest information from in-game experience, simulations, and logs; make sure to check our changelog to this page, by clicking on View Changelog at the top of the page. If you are interested in more in-depth Unholy Death Knight information in Tides of Vengeance, Battle for Azeroth's first content patch, make sure to browse the Navigation Bar below, and our list of Related Guides just beneath the Table of Contents.\r\rWould you like to quickly find this guide using Discord? You can do it easily using Jeeves Bot! Click here to add Jeeves to your Discord server.\r\r\r\rOverview\rQuick Start\rAzerite\rTalent Builds\rRotation, Priority, and Abilities\rAdvanced Concepts\rStats\rGear\rConsumables\rSimulations\rCorrecting Mistakes\rMythic+\rNEW Raid & Dazar'alor Tips\rMacros & Addons\rWeakAuras\rCommon Terms\r\r\r\rauthor ->About the Author\rI'm Bicepspump, a semi-hardcore player currently playing in Divine Ancient on Kazzak. You can often find me on the Death Knight discord discussing rotations and builds. Big shoutout to everyone there that have given me valuable insight through numerous discussions. I take part in writing and optimizing the action priority list for SimulationCraft and continuously test different hypotheses using the SimulationCraft program. Furthermore, I work with the WoWAnalyzer website where I develop modules for the Death Knight specs. Please feel free to contact me on Discord as \ud83d\udcaaBicepspump\ud83d\udcaa#6318 if you have any questions or if you found something strange in the guide. I'm always happy for a healthy discussion! Outside of playing World of Warcraft, I study for a Master of Physics at the University of Oxford. I also enjoy rowing and playing Dota 2.\r\r\r\r\r\rstats intro ->Unholy Death Knight Stats\r\rBattle for Azeroth brings many differences as far as stats go. In BFA, thanks to the stat and item level squish items will have a smaller amount of attributes overall on them, plus there are less secondary stats available in BFA as compared to Legion. \r\rStrength is your primary stat, found on plate gear. Strength increases your attack power and damage done on abilities.\r\rFor secondary stats, the Unholy Death Knight has the following:\r\r\rCritical Strike: Chance for your damaging abilities to deal 200% damage.\rHaste: Increases attack speed, reduces the global cooldown, and increases your rune regeneration.\rMastery: Increases the shadow damage you deal through Mastery: Dreadblade.\rVersatility: This is an all-around stat. Increases damage dealt, healing received and reduces damage taken\r\r\rBest Stats for Unholy Death Knight\rAt the start of this expansion, Strength was valued the absolute highest of all stats. However, the more stats we gain, the less valuable Strength becomes. We have now come to the point where all secondaries are worth more than Strength!\r\rSingle Target\r\rThe generic stat priority is the following:\r\rHaste\rCrit\rVersatility\rMastery\rStrength\r\r\r Haste > Crit > Vers >= Mastery > Strength\r\r\rAoE\r\rThe more targets we fight, the more our Mastery will be worth. This is since a lot of our AoE damage is shadow damage, which is buffed by Mastery. This is rather unfortunate since Mastery is our least valuable stat on Single Target. It's always important to keep this in mind so that you don't end up with 0 Mastery on your gear, and therefore really bad AoE.\r\rMastery\rHaste\rCrit\rVersatility\rStrength\r\r\rMastery > Haste = Crit = Vers > Strength\r\r\rPawn String\r\rThis section is here for the sole purpose of discrediting general Pawn strings. If you choose to use this addon, you do not want to use a general pawn string taken from the internet! A pawn string depends strongly on your current stat distribution. Since the value of stats can drastically change as they increase and decrease, using some general weights taken from some arbitrary distribution is going to make you no good!\r\rSo how should you use the addon? You should simulate yourself. If you do a stat weight simulation on your character, the pawn string will appear in the output HTML file. You can then simply take that string and use it as your own! Remember to regularly simulate your character when you replace pieces of gear to keep your pawn string up to date!\r\rI don't personally use pawn nor stat weights when considering upgrades, and this is for a simple reason. Those two tools only consider what happens when I increase the different stats. They do not consider the fact that I generally lose some other stat when I switch out an item. Because of this, what might seem like an upgrade from the viewpoint of pawn and stat weights, is actually not an upgrade at all. I use the "top gear" function of raidbots.com to simulate the best combination of gear from what I have available!\r\rPrevious Page:\rRotation, Priority, and Abilities\rNext Page:\rGear\r\r\r\r\r\rFeedback\r\rThanks for reading our class guides! If you have any feedback about the guides, feel free to leave a comment in the section below and we will reply as quickly as possible. If you'd like to talk with any of our writers directly you can do so by joining our Discord Server and finding them there!